Those Who Dance

Nora Brady (Lila Lee) comes up with a scheme to prove that her brother, accused of murder, is innocent. She is helped by a cop, Daniel (Monte Blue), who poses as a gangster in order to get the goods on the real killer.

As with most of these early talkies, you should not expect a major "A" production. Still, this is a fairly good one. The film's 75 minutes zip by thanks to efficient direction by William Beaudine and good performances by the 3 leads. Both Lila Lee and Betty Compson prove why they successfully made the transition to talkies. Story-wise, there's nothing new but it does manage to hold your interest. All in all, a pretty good film.

William Janney is a member of William 'Stage' Boyd's mob. He tells his loving but disapproving sister, Lila Lee, that it's just until he can get a bankroll. He thinks it's not big enough, but when Boyd shoots a cop, Janney takes the fall, and it's going to be through the gallows floor. Miss Lee convinces police captain DeWitt Jennings that her brother probably didn't do it, and sends Monte Blue undercover as a Detroit mobster and Miss Lee's putative lover to find out the truth. This puts him right in the apartment that Boyd shares with his girlfriend, Betty Compson. Boyd is getting suspicious. Can Blue get the details and save Janney before he's discovered and killed himself?

William Beaudine directs this as a pretty rough pre-code movie, even though he doesn't show the guns being fired, or even Boyd slapping around Miss Compson; he does let us hear it though; it's an interest sound technique. The suspense builds nicely, and Miss Compson's casting is just about perfect here. How this movie came to be so rare is a bit of a puzzle. I would guess that when Mervyn Leroy and Howard Hawks got their hands on the gangster genre the following year, everyone wanted Cagney and Robinson, not the curiously inert Blue. Still, as a suspense movie, if not a crime movie, it's pretty good.

William Janney (Tim) is framed for the murder of a policeman and his sister Lila Lee (Nora) sets out to prove his innocence. William 'Stage' Boyd, who liked a drink in real-life, plays a gangland boss who likes a drink. He's a bad guy who has a girlfriend Betty Compson (Kitty) whom he treats badly and she teams up with Lila for revenge with the help of undercover policeman Monte Blue (Dan).

It's an entertaining film with some humorous moments and transports you back to another era and style of film-making. The two lead females are good and the story gives you some tense moments and sequences, eg, the nightclub sequence when Boyd gets his mobsters to surround Blue on the dancefloor so he can test if Blue is undercover or not. The inevitable confrontation is approaching....

...largely because it is never shown. TCM owns the rights since this is a Warner Brothers film, and the reason they probably never show it is that the leads are completely unknown today, although the players were well known at the time this movie was made. All four of the leads (Betty Compson, Lila Lee, William Stage Boyd, and Monte Blue) were silent film actors who made a successful transition to talkies, although they were never big names in spite of this. Everybody gives a very natural performance, and this keeps your attention on the plot, which has absolutely nothing to do with dancing, as the title might make you think.

This is not your typical early talkie. It's a very riveting and well-paced gangster picture, and if someone well-known to classic film fans such as Edward G. Robinson had been playing mob leader Diamond Joe Jennings instead of lesser known William Stage Boyd, it would probably be much better remembered today. There's plenty of precode material in here too such as Lila Lee's character being called "a professional virgin" and two unmarried couples living together, with the unspoken understanding that this is not true love forever, just a temporary situation for the sake of convenient sex for all parties concerned and hot meals on the table for the men as long as the situation lasts.

You'll also see the beginnings of the social consciousness that Warners injected into so many of their Depression era dramas as the plot centers around a woman (Lila Lee) trying to make sure her brother (Willliam Janney) doesn't go to the chair for murder after a burglary he was involved in goes wrong. Prior to the burglary, Janney mentions when talking to his sister that he wouldn't have gotten involved in crime if only he could find a job - a rare commodity in 1930. Thus, from the beginning both brother and sister have your sympathy.

I highly recommend it, if you can ever find a copy.